How should we respond to North Korea's unconscionable decision to sentence two American journalists to twelve years at hard labor? North Korea has a history of using prisoners as bargaining chips or for propaganda purposes (as it did with the crew of the USS Pueblo, which it seized back in 1968), or as a way to get far more powerful countries to make symbolic apologies or concessions. This tactic shouldn't surprise us: when you are as weak as the Hermit Kingdom, facing the possibility of more intrusive sanctions, and apparently in the midst of a succession struggle of some kind, trying to find some way to get Uncle Sam to do your bidding is probably hard to resist.
But the louder we protest, the more domestic benefits the regime gets and the greater their incentive to extract the maximum prestige by prolonging the journalists' incarceration. North Korea wants this story on page one and wants Obama to pay lots of attention to them, but we don’t have to play that game. In fact, we want to remind them that we've got lots of more important countries to deal with and we just don't have much to say to them anymore. Once they are ready to release the captives, they know how to reach us. Pyongyang might demand some sort of apology or statement of regret from Washington (as it received when it finally repatriated the Pueblo's crew), and if that's all it would take to get the journalists released, then we ought to go ahead and give it to them. The good news is that we could say almost anything they asked and nobody outside of North Korea would believe we actually meant it. In fact, the more abject and absurd the apology, the less credible it would be and the less actual harm it would do to our image.
JUNG YEON-JE/AFP/Getty Images
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